Friday, February 17, 2017

Some of Putin’s Best Friends are Jews – Official Anti-Semitism in Russia Today

Paul
Goble

Staunton, February 17 – Ilf and
Petrov’s famous remark that in Russia “there are Jews but no question about
them” takes on a different meaning with each passing generation, Ilya Milshteyn
says. Under Vladimir Putin, their observation has been transformed into the following:
“there are anti-Semites [in society and among officials] but there is no
question about them.”

The corridors of power in the Putin
regime are “full” of anti-Semites, but Putin, “having been a Chekist-internationalist,”
isn’t much obsessed with any one nation, the Jews or any other, but rather with
his ability to use feelings about that group relative to others in
ever-changing circumstances, the Moscow commentator says (graniru.org/opinion/milshtein/m.258847.html).

Whenever Putin
finds there are nations which “are much worse than the Jews” in a particular
circumstance, he is ready to direct hostility and phobias toward them, be they “Chechens,
Balts, Poles, Ukrainians [or] Americans.”He doesn’t stay with one as classical anti-Semites do and he is quite
prepared to maintain relatively good relations with Israel.

Moreover, Milshteyn continues, “Jews
now are included in the elite, and oneis speaking not only about the powerful
friends of Putin … or Zhirinovsky.”And “as
for Jewish organizations [in Russia] they succumb from their devotion to the regime,
and that is valued in the Kremlin.”

In short, he argues, “the relations
of the bosses with individual comrade Jews and whole communities form a certain
harmonious unity” most of the time despite efforts by some to test it. But “nevertheless,
there are cases of quasi-government anti-Semitism. And this is easy to explain.”

That is because while the Jewish “question”
as such doesn’t exist under Putin, “the demand” for it certainly does in
certain quarters, a demand conditioned by history and one that is only
contained by reactions to the occasional scandal. But the reaction has never
been severe enough to prevent another official from making use of anti-Semitism
on another occasion.

And that means that anti-Semitism
remains a constant latent threat, one that Putin is now a died in the wool
sponsor of – indeed, he will oppose it if it creates a scandal – but may very
well be willing to tolerate or exploit if he concludes that it will serve his
purposes and that he can get away with doing so.